Jim Sleeper - Profile and Journalist Details
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Jim Sleeper
Verified
Writer, Freelance
Manhattan
Beats
Biography
Jim Sleeper, a writer on American civic culture and politics, was a lecturer in political science at Yale from 1999-2020. His reportage and commentary have appeared in most major American newspapers and magazines. In the 1990s he appeared on The PBS News Hour, the Charlie Rose show, and was an occasional contributor to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” Sleeper writes frequently about national identities and American history, electoral politics, foreign policy, higher education, and freedom of speech. His website is at www.jimsleeper.com He was a political columnist for the New York Daily News for three years during and after Rudolph Giuliani’s successful 1993 mayoral campaign against the city’s first African-American mayor, David Dinkins. Sleeper anticipated and interpreted Giuliani’s victory in a series of columns on the city’s changing political culture. In 2007, as Giuliani was preparing his presidential campaign, Sleeper posted, in The Philadelphia Inquirer and other venues, a column explaining Why Giuliani Shouldn’t Be President. An updated version was published by Foreign Policy in 2016, when Giuliani was mentioned as a possible Secretary of State or Attorney General for Donald Trump. See also, “I Once Backed Rudy Giuliani, and I Know What’s Happened to Him,” The New Republic, June 16, 2022. His columns on the failures of American “grand strategic” thinking abroad in Foreign Policy and other venues have prompted intense debate. He has been a scourge of neo-conservative foreign-policymakers and commentators, including Norman Podheretz, Charles Hill, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and Leon Wieseltier. He has written many columns on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and first years in the White House, including a prescient March, 2016 essay in Salon, during Trump’s rise through the Republican primaries, on how both parties had betrayed America. Here's an NPR interview on that essay. He has also written tellingly about Trump for The Washington Monthly, and Moyers & Co. His essays for The New York Times, the Carnegie Council’s Journal of Ethics & International Affairs, and other venues, opposing Yale’s joint venture with Singapore to establish a liberal arts college there, were extensive and much-remarked. He has written extensively about real and fabricated crises in liberal education, for The New York Times, Salon, and other venues. He also writes frequently about controversies over freedom of speech, sometimes challenging ACLU positions, as in this essay on free speech’s two slippery slopes in Salon and more recently for The Baffler and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His “Obama Chronicles,” a series of columns covering the 2008 presidential campaign, were widely read. You can watch Sleeper on a PBS documentary about New York Mayor John Lindsay that was broadcast in the spring and summer of 2010, and you can listen to him in a 20-minute NPR interview on the 20th anniversary of the publication of his The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York. Sleeper was a member of the editorial board of the quarterly Dissent from 1982 to 2021. He wrote for it frequently and edited a special edition of the magazine, In Search of New York (1987), re-published by Transaction Books, containing essays by the quarterly’s founding editor, Irving Howe, as well as by Ada Louise Huxtable, Michael Harrington, Alfred Kazin, Jim Chapin, Paul Berman, and many other contributors. A Longmeadow, Massachusetts native and Yale College graduate (1969), Sleeper has written about Puritanism’s influence on American civic and political culture for DEMOCRACY journal, The Atlantic, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a doctorate in education from Harvard (1977). In the 1970s and ’80s, he taught urban studies and writing at Harvard and Queens Colleges and at New York University. In 1982-83 he was a Charles Revson Fellow at Columbia University, studying urban housing development. In 1998 he was a fellow at the Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. From 1977 through 1980 Sleeper immersed himself in inner-city Brooklyn, New York as a reporter and publisher of a community weekly and a writer for The Village Voice. Those experiences figured strongly in his authorship of The Closest of Strangers and in an essay, “Orwell’s ‘Smelly Little Orthodoxies’ — and Ours” As a lecturer in political science at Yale from 1999 to 2020, Sleeper taught seminars on new conceptions of American national identity and on journalism, liberalism, and democracy. For his full profile, go to: https://www.jimsleeper.com/?page_id=5
Higher Education , Freedom Of Speech , Electoral Politics , American Identities , National Identities , Foreign Policy
never say never
Content
Company Info
Freelance
De Pere, Wisconsin, United States